Three weeks after the shock of 9/11, British Prime Minister Tony Blair famously captured the dramatically changed context: ‘The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon, they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.’ Blair was right. While many disagreed with his subsequent decisions, he certainly made them in a dramatically new context. Fraught with risk but also possibility, he grasped that something significant had ended and that something significantly new had begun. Infamously, Lenin lauded the ‘useful idiot’ to describe those artists, politicians and commentators who dined out on denigrating…

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